Statuette of a Standing Nude Woman, Perhaps the Great Goddess of Babylon
Unknown · Parthian, third century BC to third century AD
A small nude woman stands stiffly upright in pale alabaster, her hands held away from her hips and her hair gathered under a golden crescent. The eyes and navel were inlaid with coloured glass, and gold was used for the jewellery and the moon symbol in her hair. Her arms are separate pieces attached at the shoulder, an unusual feature that allowed them to move. At twenty-one centimetres she is intimate in scale, made to be handled, and the polish of the stone suggests she was.
Figurines of this kind come from Babylonia in the Parthian period, when Greek taste for the nude mixed with older Mesopotamian images of the goddess of love and war. The crescent points to a lunar or celestial deity, and the museum suggests she may represent the great goddess of Babylon, the successor of Ishtar. She was registered at the Louvre before eighteen seventy, when the collection of Near Eastern antiquities was in its infancy, and her precise findspot was never recorded. Look for the tiny holes in the ears where earrings once hung.
Did You Know? Her arms were carved separately and pinned at the shoulders, so the little figure could be posed like a doll in the shrine or tomb where she stood.
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